Steps
- Hold a dumbbell at the base with both hands and stand straight up. Move your legs so that they are wider than shoulder width apart from each other with your knees slightly bent.
- Your toes should be facing out. Note: Your arms should be stationary while performing the exercise. This is the starting position.
- Slowly bend the knees and lower your legs until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Make sure to inhale as this is the eccentric part of the exercise.
- Press mainly with the heel of the foot to bring the body back to the starting position while exhaling.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the plie dumbbell squat to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.